In a piece republished by The Hub, Karen Restoule, director of Indigenous Affairs at the prestigious Macdonald-Laurier Institute, described what she calls Canada’s ongoing struggle to address the legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools, highlighted by a recent incident involving a white nationalist group peacefully and lawfully demonstrating near BC’s former Kamloops Indian Residential School.Though she rightly emphasizes the need for transparency and accountability in discussions about indigenous children’s deaths, including the importance of recognizing the historical truths surrounding residential schools, her many false assertions about the schools contradict this.More specifically, her deliberately narrow focus makes her claim that polarized views hinder progress toward reconciliation particularly troubling. This rejection not only reveals her ignorance of, or aversion to, the elementary fact that “polarized views” underpin the Western scientific method, but it also contradicts her belief that the search for truth must be based on evidence rather than political narratives.That is why Restoule’s call for respectful inquiry into the past to honour what she calls “the lost indigenous children” needs to be understood within an overarching Enlightenment research context.To begin with, as high-sounding as her calls for respect and honour may be, the evidence she presents contradicts them, once again proving that reconciliation, whatever that elusive word means, must be preceded by factual and impartial truth-telling.More specifically, her assertion that “inquiry must be done respectfully” begins with what she pejoratively calls a “sick stunt,” hardly a respectful term.Just three days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a group of men dressed in black and masked in white balaclavas gathered near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in BC. They carried black flags bearing the logo of the white nationalist group Second Sons Canada. Later, they moved to a nearby overpass above the Trans-Canada Highway, where they unfurled a large cloth sign bearing these words: “Got Bones?” Their sick stunt is the culmination of the fractured national conversation around residential schools we’ve had in this country for the last half-decade..Restoule ignores that the September 27 protest was a nonviolent display on public property near the Kamloops Indian Residential School, now operating as a community and administrative centre, testimony to the robust construction of this facility. As for the banner reading “Got Bones?” it merely highlights the absence of evidence of student burials in a former apple orchard near the school. Conversely, these protestors were not questioning the carefully recorded fact that 51 student deaths took place at the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School during its 79 years of operation, 1890-1969. Instead, they were peacefully questioning the announcement on May 27, 2021, of the discovery of the buried remains of 215 unnamed children near the school, an announcement whose claims remain unproven nearly six years later. Moreover, one person’s “sick stunt” may well be another person’s call for objectivity, transparency, and accountability, concepts incompatible with the “indigenous knowings” underpinning both Restoule’s worldview and the 2021 Kamloops announcement.Here is a link to a video showing what actually happened at this flimsily termed “sick stunt.” .Indeed, all the violence, including church burnings and vandalism, has been coming from the “anti-denialism” side. As of August 27, 2026, 133 Christian churches across Canada have been vandalized, burned to the ground, or desecrated.As an ardent anti-denialist, Restoule not only ignores the absence of the fundamental elements underlying the Western scientific method, but also reinforces many indigenous falsehoods while inventing new ones of her own, transforming herself in the process from an unbiased researcher into a strident indigenous lobbyist.One of these new inventions is that “Five years ago, in May 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc reported finding 215 anomalies in the grounds surrounding the Kamloops Indian Residential School site.”The Kamloops Band, as it is legally called, reported no such thing.Instead, Band Chief Rosanne Casimir’s May 27, 2021, news release said the following:.Yes, Restoule is correct that “The discovery sent shockwaves across the country and indeed, around the world — especially after media outlets initially claimed a 'mass grave' of Indigenous children had been discovered,” an assertion that hides the fact that Chief Casimir herself peddled the “mass grave” canard by moving the following resolution, even embellishing it with a charge of genocide, at the Assembly of First Nations annual general meeting in July 2021:“[The Chiefs-in-Assembly] stand in solidarity with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops Indian Band) and all survivors of the Residential School System and their families and assert that the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples that must be thoroughly examined and considered in terms of Canada’s potential breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law.” (Emphasis added).Equating the Indian Residential School system, a largely voluntary educational effort where only children from broken, abusive, or severely neglectful homes were obliged to attend and which saw not a single verified murder of an indigenous student by a non-Aboriginal staff member during its 114 years of operation, with the organized murder of some six million Jews and millions of other “undesirable” people so defames the latter that it could easily be termed Holocaust denial.Restoule also claims that “Canadians should be able to ask questions about what is happening at Kamloops,” ignoring that any questioning, respectful or not, has immediately provoked charges of “residential school denialism.”Restoule’s claim that “Asking challenging questions earnestly [about the Indian Residential Schools] is very different than asking them with the intent to mock or be cruel about a serious moment in our shared history” cannot be taken seriously. This is because the writers who have dispassionately challenged the prevailing indigenous narrative about the residential schools here, here, here, here, here, and here, have promptly been mocked as “genocide deniers,” an immoral cultural appropriation of the denial of the real genocide called the Holocaust. As for the finding in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report “that more than 3,200 children had died while attending Indian residential schools in Canada” and that many of “the little ones didn’t make it back home,” Restoule fails to acknowledge that (1) thousands of non-indigenous children died from contagious diseases during the same period the Indian Residential Schools were operating, 1883-1996; (2) nearly all indigenous students who entered a residential school were already infected with TB contracted on their crowded home reserves; and (3) whenever possible, children were sent home or to a hospital when they became very ill. Her other claims are either specious or totally decontextualized.When she claims, “Historical records also show institutional neglect, poor living conditions, lack of medical care, physical and sexual abuse, and in some cases, like 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack who tried to escape, death,” she implies that such deaths were somehow morally or criminally problematic rather than reflecting the historical fact that thousands of Canadians of all races and ethnicities suffered an early death from contagious diseases like tuberculosis before effective cures and preventive vaccines existed.As for the case of Chanie Wenjack, careful research has debunked its contents here, here, and here.Perhaps Restoule’s most outrageous claim is her assertion that “At least 3,200 Indigenous children were forced by their government to attend residential schools — and never came home.” The “forced to attend” and “never came home” assertions have long been discredited by the meticulous study of historical records and documents showing that, for most students, these boarding schools were far from mandatory, especially in the early years.As archival data shows, school attendance, whether at a boarding, day, or public school, was not mandatory until 1920; such attendance was at best haphazard throughout the Indian Residential School era, 1883-1996; children were carefully monitored from admittance to discharge because funding from Ottawa depended on the submission of formal attendance records; parents or guardians were required to sign an application form before their children were admitted to these government-funded boarding schools; no more than one-third of indigenous children attended an Indian Residential School; those who did attended for an average of only 4.5 years; and the only children “forced” to attend were those from orphaned, abusive, or dysfunctional homes. .Most importantly, parents gladly and freely accepted attendance, as shown by the requirement that they sign application forms permitting their children’s acceptance so they could “learn the white man’s ways.”.Moreover, none of these 3,200-plus children is “missing” because they are “buried” in the archives, as indirectly revealed by none other than Kimberly Murray, the former federal government’s independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites, who, on March 21, 2023, stated there are no missing Indian Residential School children in her testimony before the federal government’s Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples: “The family doesn't know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium [or] an Indian residential school. They were just told that they died. The children aren't missing; they're buried in the cemeteries. They're missing because the families were never told where they're buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that and we know that they're going to have a little bit closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that's what keeps us going.”Though there is no evidence that thousands of children's deaths were not reported to their parents, and lots of evidence to the contrary, Murray's statement repudiates the established indigenous narrative accepted by Restoule about missing children.This does not deny that some children “never came home” because they were taken to hospitals and sanatoria, hence buried elsewhere, or because transportation to their home reserves was impossible due to harsh winter conditions.Contrary to Murray’s undocumented assertion, this doesn’t mean their families were not informed or that their deaths and interment were not correctly recorded.Near the end of her piece, Restoule argues that “The search for the ‘truth’ in ‘truth and reconciliation’ requires us, as a country, to examine all the facts…” Sometimes facts will not align with your worldview or ideology. But that’s when the ‘truth’ — based on evidence, not narratives — matters the most.It's too bad Restoule failed to follow her own sage advice.Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
